Gentlemen of the Road
A generic moniker applied to travelers who project their own insecurities and lack of local knowledge on to the people and places they fail to understand in their travels.
Essential characteristics:
1) Rely on sweeping generalizations about the inadequacies or deficiencies of a local population that offer no room for the role of the systemic influences or constraints on those people, While showing no apparent desire to learn about or understand said factors.
2) Fancy themselves superior to tourists who opt for a comfortable option over more "adventurous" methods, while simultaneously expressing indignation (directed at the bystanders of their "adventure") when they are not treated with the same sort coddling that they rebuke others for choosing. Of essential importance is that this irony is completely lost on them.
3) Devolve into blatantly racist diatribes and jokes while apparently believing that reference to their past espousal of a now abandoned multiculturalism, somehow makes their xenophobia validated. They believe that the culturally open attitude they held from the comfort of their home country was due to their own virtue, while the subsequent condemnations are due to the fundamental flaws of those people and no shortcomings of the travelers themselves.
The expression was coined in the summer of 2010 in Hanoi, Vietnam after awareness of a travelers' blog bearing the same name quickly spread via Twitter and Facebook in Hanoi's English speaking community.
Essential characteristics:
1) Rely on sweeping generalizations about the inadequacies or deficiencies of a local population that offer no room for the role of the systemic influences or constraints on those people, While showing no apparent desire to learn about or understand said factors.
2) Fancy themselves superior to tourists who opt for a comfortable option over more "adventurous" methods, while simultaneously expressing indignation (directed at the bystanders of their "adventure") when they are not treated with the same sort coddling that they rebuke others for choosing. Of essential importance is that this irony is completely lost on them.
3) Devolve into blatantly racist diatribes and jokes while apparently believing that reference to their past espousal of a now abandoned multiculturalism, somehow makes their xenophobia validated. They believe that the culturally open attitude they held from the comfort of their home country was due to their own virtue, while the subsequent condemnations are due to the fundamental flaws of those people and no shortcomings of the travelers themselves.
The expression was coined in the summer of 2010 in Hanoi, Vietnam after awareness of a travelers' blog bearing the same name quickly spread via Twitter and Facebook in Hanoi's English speaking community.
Gentlemen of the Road by HanoiSummer July 16, 2010
